1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to multimedia communications. More particularly, the present invention relates to the synchronous delivery of annotated multimedia streams over a diverse computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the proliferation of connections to the internet by a rapidly growing number of users, the viability of the internet as a widely accepted medium of communication has increased correspondingly. Bandwidth requirements can vary significantly depending on the type of multimedia data being delivered. For example, a low resolution, low frame rate video telephone call may require only an ISDN connection, while a high resolution video broadcast of a live event to a large group of viewers may require the bandwidth of a T1 connection. Hence, the ability to deliver of multimedia data over the internet is limited by bandwidth capacity and cost of the network connection and also by the computational capability of the server and client computers.
Existing conventional internet applications, such as electronic mailers and web browser, are capable of transferring and presenting textual and graphical information. However, none of these individual internet applications effectively provide synchronous delivery of a combination of diverse multimedia streams in a coherent and integrated manner. This is because executing several independent and unrelated applications to present the diverse combination of multimedia streams on a client computer can result in a hodgepodge of poor quality, incompatible and/or incoherent presentations.
In view of the foregoing, there are desired improved techniques for reliably providing a multimedia stream such as a video and audio stream, together with annotations such as textual and graphical information in an integrated seamless package to client computer(s), while efficiently utilizing the network resources and consuming minimal computational cycles on the client computer(s).